Latest / Murder Files Unsealed / Wildest true crime docs perfect for 24 Hours in Police Custody fans

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Wildest true crime docs perfect for 24 Hours in Police Custody fans · Murder Files Unsealed

0:00
Speaker 1: So I want you to just imagine you are sitting
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in a room. It is like eight feet by eight feet.
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The walls are the sterile scuff marked cream color, and
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there are zero window.
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Speaker 2: Right, total isolation, exactly.
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Speaker 1: And the hum of the fluorescent lights above you is
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like the only constant sound, just buzzing at a frequency
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that slightly rattles your teeth.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, that classic institutional hum.
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Speaker 1: Right. And across the table sits a detective who has
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been asking you the exact same question for I mean,
0:32
six hours.
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Speaker 2: Straight, which is agonizing, it is.
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Speaker 1: And you know you are innocent, but the air in
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the room is heavy, and your prefrontal cortex is practically
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screaming for sleep, absolutely, and the boundary between what you
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know to be true and what the detective is telling
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you is starting to just completely blur. You are in
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the custody suite.
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Speaker 2: It is quite literally the ultimate pressure cooker. Yeah. And
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you know what makes that environment so incredibly fascinating from
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a psychological standpoint is that the exact geographical coordinate where
1:03
the rigid machinery of the law violently collides with human nature.
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Speaker 1: With all its messiness. Welcome to the deep dive, everyone,
1:10
We are speaking directly to you, the listener, especially if
1:14
you're someone who finds yourself just like completely captivated by
1:18
the gritty, unvarnished reality of.
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Speaker 2: Policing, right, the people who really get it.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, you know exactly the vibe we are talking about today.
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It is that tension of shows like twenty four hours
1:29
in police custody.
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Speaker 2: Oh yeah, that raw, dizzying bodycam footage of a raid
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at like three in the morning exactly.
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Speaker 1: So we are going to explore what happens in those
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sterile rooms and those forensic labs and on those cordoned
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off streets. But we are entirely skipping the sensationalized Hollywood
1:48
versions of this step as Please, no dramatic narrators, right,
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no actors pretending to be cops.
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Speaker 2: Because honestly, the reality requires absolutely no embellishment at all.
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Speaker 1: None.
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Speaker 2: The focus of our analysis today is the all bureaucratic
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and honestly frequently chaotic reality of actual criminal investigations. Yeah.
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Speaker 1: It's a wild spectrum.
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Speaker 2: It really is. I mean, we are looking at a
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spectrum that begins with these breathtaking, microscopic scientific triumphs and
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ends with some of the most catastrophic systemic failures. I'magical, right,
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We're tracking exhausted detectives, the evolution of forensic technology, and
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those high stake psychological chess games played out while the
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custody clock just keeps ticking down.
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Speaker 1: Okay, let's impact this because to really understand how things
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go spectacularly wrong, we first have to understand what it
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looks like when the system works perfectly.
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Speaker 2: We need to establish the baseline.
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Speaker 1: Right, the baseline of the ideal procedure, and that starts
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with the sheer physical grind and the technological marvels of
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modern forensics science. Exactly. It starts with the science.
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Speaker 2: And science is inherently comforting.
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Speaker 1: You know why is that?
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Speaker 2: Well, because it operates on absolute rules, unlike human memory
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or a detectives, gut intuition, physics and biology just do
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not have agendas.
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Speaker 1: Right, they don't care about the narrative.
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Speaker 2: Exactly. If we look at the operations of the West
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Midlands Police forensic teams, for example, from that documentary Forensics
3:13
the Real CSI, we see the absolute pinnacle of this
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objective approach.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, that BBC series is incredible. It's like the lab
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rat companion piece to those right along shows.
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Speaker 2: Right, and the process from the moment in nine call
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drops to the final courtroom verdict. It's just this massive,
3:32
logistical and scientific undertaking and.
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Speaker 1: It is not glamorous at all. I mean, you are
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dealing with investigators meticulously processing scenes that are just inherently chaotic,
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very much so. We are talking about extracting pristine data
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from the aftermath of a shotgun blast in a really
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confined hallway, or processing heavily decomposed remains in a morg freezer.
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Speaker 2: It is a grueling, often traumatic environment, but the expectation
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placed on them is absolute perfection, which brings us to
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a specific scenario that completely blew my mind.
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Speaker 1: Oh the gold heist.
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Speaker 2: Yes, right, there was a three hundred thousand pound gold
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heist at a Birmingham jeweler's and the.
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Speaker 1: Defining characteristic of this crime was its sheer, terrifying speed.
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Speaker 2: Speed is the absolute enemy of a traditional investigation.
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Speaker 1: Right, because there's no time to process anything exactly.
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Speaker 2: In this instance, armed robbers drove a heavy goods vehicle
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directly through the reinforced glass frontage.
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Speaker 1: Of the shot just smashed right through it.
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Speaker 2: They overwhelmed the security, extracted the gold and fled, and
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the entire operation from the initial impact to the getaway
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took under sixty.
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Speaker 1: Seconds, under a minute, I mean in sixty seconds, traditional
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policing is virtually paralyzed.
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Speaker 2: There is nothing they can do in that timeframe, right.
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Speaker 1: There's no time for eyewitnesses to get a good look
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at a face, especially if the perpetrators are wearing masks, and.
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Speaker 2: The getaway vehicle is almost always stolen and dumped immediately.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, the criminals are highly organized, they're professional, and they
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know exactly what they're doing. So historically a crime executed
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that fast, that cleanly is just a ghost story.
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Speaker 2: The trail is instantly cold, completely cold. But this is
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where the foundational doctrine of forensic science really comes into play,
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which is lock Guard's exchange principle.
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Speaker 1: Right, Edmund Locard exactly.
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Speaker 2: Doctor Edmund Locard. He was a pioneer in forensic science,
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and he formulated the principle that every contact leaves.
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Speaker 1: A trace, every single one.
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Speaker 2: Yes, it is a physical impossibility for a human being
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to enter an environment, exert the immense physical force required
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to smash through a building, steal hundreds of thousands of
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pounds of heavy metal, and leave without bringing something into
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that environment or taking something away.
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Speaker 1: Even if they're only there for sixty seconds.
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Speaker 2: Even in sixty seconds, and that.
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Speaker 1: Is exactly what happened here. I mean, the breakthrough didn't
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come from some dramatic interrogation room confession or a criminal
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informant looking for a plea deal.
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Speaker 2: No, it didn't.
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Speaker 1: It came down to a single solitary glove discarded near
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the dumped getaway vehicle.
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Speaker 2: A single glove. I mean, think about the sheer volume
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of data contained on that one piece of fabric.
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Speaker 1: It's basically a hard drive of evidence, it really is.
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Speaker 2: You have the external surface, which might contain microabrasions macking,
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the specific shattered glass of the jewelers, or chemical residues
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from the skull and truck, right, But more importantly, you
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have the interior of the glove.
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Speaker 1: Oh yeah, the sweat.
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Speaker 2: Yes, in a high adrenaline situation, like an armed heist,
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the human body sweats profusely, and that sweat contains epithelial cells,
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skin cells that are shed from the wearer's hand.
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Speaker 1: Which takes us right into the laboratory and the technological
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arsenal these teams have at their disposal is just staggering.
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Speaker 2: It's science fiction level stuff.
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Speaker 1: Right. We are moving way, way beyond just dusting for
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fingerprints with a little brush. Oh. Absolutely, They are using
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digital fingerprint enhancement where they isolate specific light wavelengths to
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make invisible oils floor.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, that's incredible.
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Speaker 1: And then you have Polymeer's chain reaction or a PCR,
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which is just a game changer, it really is. It
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allows scientists to take a minuscule, almost invisible sample of
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degraded DNA from the inside of that sweaty glove and amplify.
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Speaker 2: It, essentially copying it millions of times over.
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Speaker 1: Exactly until they have a profile large enough to run
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through a national database.
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Speaker 2: And you know what's fascinating here is how these technologies
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allow investigators to solve what were previously considered completely impossible cases.
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Speaker 1: Right like cases from decades.
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Speaker 2: Ago, yeah, or even modern ones with terrible evidence. For instance,
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the use of advanced algorithms to separate complex mixed DNA
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profiles from rape kits.
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Speaker 1: That is so important.
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Speaker 2: It is it allows analysts to distinguish the victim's DNA
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from the perpetrators even when the sample is heavily degraded.
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Or the use of real time CT scanners on victims.
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Speaker 1: Oh, the CT scanners. That part of the source material
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was just unbelievable to me.
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Speaker 2: It is a assive leap forward. I mean, historically, to
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determine the trajectory of a bullet or the exact nature
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of an internal fracture, a pathologist had to perform a
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highly invasive physical autopsy.
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Speaker 1: Right, They had to open the body up, exactly.
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Speaker 2: And the paradox of an autopsy is that the act
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of examining the evidence inherently destroys the original state of
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the body.
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Speaker 1: Wow. Yeah, I never thought about it like that, right,
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But by.
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Speaker 2: Putting a homicide victim through a medical CT scanner, first,
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investigators can map the entire internal structure of the body
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in three dimensions.
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Speaker 1: Before making a single cut exactly.
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Speaker 2: They can digitally peel back layers of skin and muscle
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on a computer screen, tracking a bullet's exact path without
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ever making a physical incision.
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Speaker 1: So it preserves the crime scene.
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Speaker 2: It preserves the body itself in a state of digital permanence.
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Speaker 1: It's like having a digital safe state of the evidence,
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like in a video game.
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Speaker 2: That's a perfect analogy.
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Speaker 1: And it's not just biology either. I mean, you mentioned
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Locard's principle earlier. There's this technique called glass refractometry.
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Speaker 2: Oh, yes, this is fascinating physics.
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Speaker 1: Right. So, say someone breaks a window during a burglary
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and they flee the scene, but the police arrest a
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suspect a mile away. The suspect denies everything, but the
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forensic team finds a shard of glass embedded in the
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tread of the suspect's shoe.
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Speaker 2: And we were talking about a shard the size of
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a grain.
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Speaker 1: Of sand, exactly just tiny. Now, to the naked eye,
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all clear glass looks exactly the same, right, right, But
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on a molecular level, the glass used in a residential
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window is manufactured completely differently than the glass and a
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car windshield, or like a drinking glass.
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Speaker 2: Yes, and this changes its refractive index.
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Speaker 1: The refractive index, which is the.
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Speaker 2: Exact mathematical degree to which it bends light passing through it.
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Speaker 1: Right, So, the scientists take this microscopic grain of sand
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sized glass from the shoe and they immerse it in
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specialized silicone oils under a microscope.
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Speaker 2: And then they heat the oil.
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Speaker 1: Yes, they heat the oil, which changes the oil's refractive index.
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And when the refractive index of the oil perfectly, the
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refractive index of the glass shard.
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Speaker 2: The glass literally vanishes from view.
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Speaker 1: It becomes completely invisible.
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Speaker 2: The beckline, which is that optical halo around the glass,
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just disappears. It's like magic, but it's math. And by
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recording the exact temperature and the known index of the
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oil at that specific moment, they get a precise, unique
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numeric value for that specific shard of glass. And if
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that highly specific number matches the glass left in the
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broken window frame at the crime scene, you have tied
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the suspect to the room with mathematical certainty.
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Speaker 1: It is incredible. I mean, you are matching the invisible
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physics of light to catch a burglar. It's like solving
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a jigsaw puzzle where the pieces are microscopic and half
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of them are missing.
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Speaker 2: It really is.
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Speaker 1: But Okay, here's where I have to push back a little,
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or at least ask the difficult question.
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Speaker 2: Go for it.
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Speaker 1: When you describe the DNA amplification, the three DCT scans,
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the vanishing glass, it sounds totally infallible. Does this create
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an unrealistic expectation?
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Speaker 2: Ah?
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Speaker 1: Like, if you are sitting on a jury today, do
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you start demanding that every single crime scene produces this
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magic microscopic smoking gun.
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Speaker 2: You are identifying what we call the CSI.
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Speaker 1: Effect, the CSI effects, right, and it.
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Speaker 2: Is a massive headache for modern prosecutors. Juries have been
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conditioned by media to expect pristine scientific certainty in every
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single case.
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Speaker 1: Even when it's just not there.
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Speaker 2: If there isn't a perfect DNA match or a digitally
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enhanced singerprint, juries are increasingly hesitant to convict wow, even
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if there is overwhelming, circumstantial or behavioral evidence. But you know,
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if we connect this to the bigger picture of actual
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police procedure, the documentary footage reveals the hidden variable that
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the science cannot control.
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Speaker 1: And what's that time the custody clock?
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Speaker 2: Precisely, the science might be nearly perfect, but the environment
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that operates in is highly bureaucratic. In many jurisdictions, particularly
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in the UK, when a suspect is arrested, the police
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have exactly twenty four hours to hold them in.
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Speaker 1: Custody, just twenty four hours.
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Speaker 2: Yes, at the end of those twenty four hours, they
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must either officially charge them with a crime or let
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them walk out the front door.
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Speaker 1: So you have these brilliant forensic scientists operating these million
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dollar machines, but they aren't just working in an ivory
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tower at their own pace.
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Speaker 2: Now they're practically sprinting, right.
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Speaker 1: You see the text rushing back to the lab with
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the evidence bags, and they know that the suspect is
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currently sitting in.
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Speaker 2: A cell sipping a cup of terrible police station.
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Speaker 1: Tea exactly, and the clock is ticking down twenty hours,
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fifteen hours, four hours.
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Speaker 2: It completely humanizes the bureaucratic grind.
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Speaker 1: Of it all it does.
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Speaker 2: The tension isn't whether the glass refractometry actually works. The
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tension is whether the lab can heat the oil, find
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the backline, crunch the numbers, and physically get the printed
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report into the hands of the interviewing detective before time
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runs out, right before the customs sergent legally has to
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release the mastermind of a three hundred thousand pound heist.
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Speaker 1: The science is racing against humans law. That is exactly
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what it is, Okay, So when the science wins that race,
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it is beautiful. It is objective justice, absolutely, But human
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beings are the ones deciding who shooes to test for
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glass or whose DNA to run through the database in
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the first place.
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Speaker 2: Yes, the human element is always there, and human.
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Speaker 1: Beings are deeply profoundly flawed we are, which brings us
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to the absolute fracture point of the justice system.
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Speaker 2: Here we go.
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Speaker 1: What happens when the investigators arrive at a scene and
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they completely ignore the physical evidence because their brains have
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already written the ending of the story.
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Speaker 2: Right, you are describing the shift from objective data collection
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to subjective narrative building.
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Speaker 1: And it is terrifying.
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Speaker 2: It is, and there is no phenomenon more dangerous in
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an investigation than confirmation bias.
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Speaker 1: This transitions us perfectly into one of the most infuriating
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cases I have ever looked at. American Knightma the twenty
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fifteen Valeo, California kidnapping, as documented in the twenty twenty
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four series American Nightmare. It's a tough wie, it really is.
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The setup is the absolute highest priority call a police
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department can receive.
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Speaker 2: A violent home invasion.
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Speaker 1: In the middle of the night. A woman, Denise Huskins,
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is abducted right from her bed. Horrific Her boyfriend, Aaron Quinn,
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survives the attack. He is bound, he's drugged, but he
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manages to free himself and he immediately calls the police
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to report that the woman he loves has been stolen now.
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Speaker 2: Protocol dictates that the scene must be locked down immediately right,
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Forensics must be deployed to search for the trace evidence
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we just discussed, and a massive manhunt should be initiated.
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Speaker 1: But that is not what happens.
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Speaker 2: No, Aaron Quinn is not treated as a victim or
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a critical witness.
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Speaker 1: Almost the second the police arrive, he is sequestered, transported
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to the station, and placed in an interrogation room.
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Speaker 2: And the detectives absolutely grilled him.
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Speaker 1: They didn't ask him to help find the kidnappers. They
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interrogated him for hours because they were completely, unequivocally convinced
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that he had murdered Denise and elaborately staged the entire
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home invasion. It's baffling, I mean, why why would they
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jump to that conclusion so fast, ignoring the broken glass,
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ignoring his clear signs of trauma.
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Speaker 2: Well, we have to look at the heuristics of policing
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to understand that.
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Speaker 1: Okay, it's a heuristic.
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Speaker 2: A heuristic is a mental shortcut that helps the brain
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make quick decisions.
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Speaker 1: Like a rule of thumb exactly.
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Speaker 2: Statistically speaking, if a woman goes missing or is found
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murdered in a domestic setting, the overwhelming majority of the time,
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the perpetrator is the romantic.
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Speaker 1: Partner, right, the husband, or the boyfriend.
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Speaker 2: Right. Detectives rely on this heuristic because, quite frankly, it
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is usually right.
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Speaker 1: But a statistical probability is not physical evidence.
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Speaker 2: No, it is not.
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Speaker 1: So they walked into the house, looked at Aaron, and
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their brains just ran the algorithm boyfriend equals guilty.
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Speaker 2: Exactly, and that is the genesis of confirmation bias. The
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reticular activating system in the human brain acts as a filter. Okay,
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Once the detectives formed the hypothesis that Aaron was a murderer,
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their brains literally began filtering out any information that contradicted
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that narrative, oh wow, while magnifying anything that supported it.
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It is a very real form of neurological tunnel vision.
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Speaker 1: And the interrogation tactics they used on Aarin while in
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this tunnel vision are just harrowing.
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Speaker 2: They really are.
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Speaker 1: They strapped him to a polygraph a light detector tests,
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they isolated him, They aggressively challenged his timeline.
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Speaker 2: Zandard pressure tactics.
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Speaker 1: But here's where it crosses the line from aggressive questioning
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into psychological warfare. They started feeding him false information. They
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intentionally lied to him, implying they had evidence proving he
16:39
did it, trying to force a confession for a murder
16:42
that hadn't even occurred.
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Speaker 2: And this highlights a crucial flaw in the American interrogation model,
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which in many jurisdictions it is entirely legal for law
16:50
enforcement to lie to a suspect that is wild to me.
16:54
They can claim they have your fingerprints on the murder weapon,
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or that your partner has already confessed and implicated.
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Speaker 1: You, even if it's completely fabricated.
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Speaker 2: Yes, the goal of this tactic isn't to uncover the
17:06
objective truth. The goal is to break the suspect's psychological
17:09
resolve and achieve compliance.
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Speaker 1: Get the confession at all costs.
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Speaker 2: Right.
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Speaker 1: But then the unthinkable happens. In this case, the twist
17:18
that should have completely shattered the police's tunnel vision.
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Speaker 2: The nise reappears.
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Speaker 1: She turns up alive, hundreds of miles away in.
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Speaker 2: Huntington Beach, which is incredible.
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Speaker 1: She had been held hostage, drugged, repeatedly sexually assaulted, and
17:30
finally released by her captor.
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Speaker 2: Objectively, the introduction of a living victim should instantly correct
17:36
the procedural course. Right, the initial hypothesis that Aaron killed
17:40
Denise is now demonstrably factually false.
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Speaker 1: The heuristic failed, but they don't course correct. No, and
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this is where my blood pressure just spikes. Instead of pivoting,
17:52
instead of mobilizing every unit to hunt down the violent
17:56
serial rapist who is currently on the loose.
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Speaker 2: The Valeo Police double do they.
18:00
Speaker 1: Hold a press conference? I know, and they publicly accuse
18:04
Aaron and Denise of faking the entire thing. They literally
18:07
labeled Denise the real gone.
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Speaker 2: Girl, referencing the fictional thriller where a woman fakes her
18:13
on kidnapping.
18:14
Speaker 1: Right. They accuse victims of a horrific trauma of orchestrating
18:18
a hopes for attention or money.
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Speaker 2: And you know, this raises an important question about the
18:22
institutional ego of law enforcement agencies.
18:25
Speaker 1: Because they just couldn't admit they were wrong.
18:27
Speaker 2: Exactly. Once a department has publicly committed to a narrative,
18:30
in this case, that Aaron was the prime suspect, the
18:35
bureaucratic inertia required to reverse course and admit a catastrophic
18:38
failure is massive.
18:40
Speaker 1: It's too embarrassing for them.
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Speaker 2: It is actually easier psychologically for these detectives to invent
18:45
a convoluted, sociopathic conspiracy engineered by the victims than to
18:50
accept the agonizing reality.
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Speaker 1: Which is that they misread the scene.
18:53
Speaker 2: They misread the scene, they tortured an innocent man in
18:56
the interrogation room, and they let a monster escape. Institutional
19:01
defensive hostility completely replaced investigative curiosity, and.
19:06
Speaker 1: The monster was out there. The real perpetrator was an
19:08
ex marine named Matthew Muller. Yes, and he wasn't caught
19:12
through clever detective work by the Voyo police. He was
19:15
only caught because he got sloppy and committed another home
19:18
invasion in a totally different county.
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Speaker 2: And the evidence that finally brought him.
19:23
Speaker 1: Down it wasn't a gut feeling, no, it was.
19:25
Speaker 2: The objective science from our first discussion right.
19:28
Speaker 1: The new investigators found his DNA, and they found a
19:31
GoPro camera in his possession that contained undeniable digital evidence
19:36
of his crimes against Denise.
19:37
Speaker 2: The ironies profound. The objective physics of DNA and digital
19:41
memory finally overrode the subjective, biased narrative of the initial detectives.
19:46
Speaker 1: But the damage inflicted on the victims during that delay
19:49
was just incalculable.
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Speaker 2: Absolutely in calculus den.
19:51
Speaker 1: Thee Huskins and Aaron Quinn eventually sued the city of
19:54
Leo and won a two point five million dollar settlement, which.
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Speaker 2: They absolutely deserved.
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Speaker 1: But here's where it gets really interesting for anyone studying
20:02
the genre. Most procedurals follow a comforting arc.
20:06
Speaker 2: Right, chaos occurs, competent professionals arrive, orders is restored.
20:10
Speaker 1: Exactly, But American Nightmare flips the script. You are not
20:15
watching a net close around a criminal. No, you are
20:18
watching the machinery of the state slowly, inevitably crush the innocent.
20:23
The custody window, which is designed to protect society, transforms
20:28
into an absolute nightmare where the state controls your reality
20:32
and tries to manufacture your guilt.
20:34
Speaker 2: Which is the perfect segue to understanding exactly how that
20:37
manufacturing process works.
20:38
Speaker 1: Yes, let's get into that.
20:40
Speaker 2: Because if the Valeo police had pushed Aaron Quinn just
20:42
a little harder, they might have gotten the false confection
20:45
they were looking for.
20:46
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, we need to zoom in.
20:48
Speaker 2: On the specific psychological mechanics of the interview room itself, right.
20:51
Speaker 1: We need to talk about how an environment can coerce
20:54
a confession out of thin air with absolutely zero physical evidence.
20:58
Speaker 2: It happens much more often and people think.
21:01
Speaker 1: And this brings us to the astonishing cases analyzed in
21:04
the series The Confession Tapes. We are talking about cases
21:07
where there is no DNA, no glass of fractometry, no
21:11
murder weapon, nothing. The entire conviction rests on a person
21:14
sitting in a room and saying I did it.
21:17
Speaker 2: And to the average person, this is the most baffling
21:20
phenomenon in the entire criminal.
21:22
Speaker 1: Justice system, it makes no sense.
21:24
Speaker 2: The fundamental human drive is self preservation. Why on earth
21:28
would someone confess to a brutal crime they did not commit,
21:32
knowing it will result in a life sentence.
21:34
Speaker 1: It seems entirely irrational. I think everyone listening right now
21:37
is thinking the exact same thing. I would never do
21:39
that if I knew I was innocent, I would just
21:41
ask for a lawyer and stare at the wall.
21:43
Speaker 2: But that is the logical response generated by a well rested,
21:46
unthreatened brain sitting in the comfort of a living.
21:49
Speaker 1: Room right watching it on TV.
21:51
Speaker 2: Exactly, you have to understand the severe cognitive alterations that
21:55
occur in the custody suite.
21:57
Speaker 1: It changes you.
21:58
Speaker 2: The Confession tapessly dissects this by showing the raw interrogation footage,
22:04
and at the center of almost all these false confessions
22:07
is a psychological framework known as the read technique.
22:10
Speaker 1: Okay, break this down for us, because watching it happen
22:13
on the tapes is like watching someone slowly drown is a.
22:16
Speaker 2: Very apt comparison. The read technique is an interrogation method
22:21
developed in the nineteen fifties, and it is explicitly designed
22:24
to systematically dismantle a suspect's resistance. Okay, it operates on
22:29
a presumption of absolute guilt.
22:31
Speaker 1: So they already think you did it.
22:32
Speaker 2: Yes. It generally has three phases. First, the fact analysis,
22:37
where the detective decides you are guilty based on body
22:39
language or inconsistencies in your story.
22:42
Speaker 1: Which is completely subjective.
22:43
Speaker 2: Highly subjective. Second, the behavior analysis interview, which involves asking
22:48
non accusatory questions to establish a.
22:50
Speaker 1: Baseline like how's your day going?
22:52
Speaker 2: Right? But the third phase is the interrogation itself, and
22:55
this is where the psychological trap is set.
22:57
Speaker 1: Right. The detective walks in, stands over the suspect and
22:59
immediately cuts off all denials.
23:01
Speaker 2: Yes, they state with absolute manufactured certainty that they know
23:06
the suspect committed the crime.
23:08
Speaker 1: They don't ask, they tell.
23:09
Speaker 2: Exactly, and every time the suspect says I didn't do it,
23:13
the detective.
23:13
Speaker 1: Interrupts, just shut them down.
23:15
Speaker 2: They do not allow the denial to take root in
23:18
the room, and this induces a state of learned helplessness.
23:23
The suspect realizes that telling the truth is literally getting
23:27
them nowhere.
23:28
Speaker 1: But just ignoring denials isn't enough to make someone confess
23:32
to murder.
23:33
Speaker 2: No, it's not. The most insidious part of the read
23:36
technique is called theme development. Theme development, the detective engages
23:40
in minimization. They offer the suspect a morally acceptable, face
23:44
saving narrative for why the crime occurred. Oh wow, they say, Look,
23:48
I know you aren't a monster. I know you didn't
23:50
plan this. The victim provoked you, right, giving them an out.
23:53
It was an accident. Things just got out of hand.
23:56
If you just tell me it was an accident, the
23:58
judge will understand.
23:59
Speaker 1: It's like a Chinese finger trap for the mind.
24:01
Speaker 2: Exactly.
24:01
Speaker 1: It The harder you pull away by insisting on your
24:04
total innocence, the tighter the pressure gets.
24:07
Speaker 2: Yes, but if you lean into the trap. If you
24:09
accept their lesser narrative, the pressure suddenly releases.
24:13
Speaker 1: Exactly and you must compound this psychological trap with severe
24:17
physiological stress right the exhaust. The suspects in these tapes
24:20
are often subjected to extreme sleep deprivation, sometimes kept awake
24:24
for twenty four, thirty six or forty eight hours.
24:27
Speaker 2: What is physically happening to the brain during that kind
24:30
of sleep deprivation.
24:31
Speaker 1: Well, when you are acutely sleep deprived, the prefonnneal cortex,
24:35
which is the part of the brain responsible for complex planning,
24:39
logic and assessing long term consequences, begins to severely malfunction.
24:44
Speaker 2: It just shuts down.
24:45
Speaker 1: Activity shifts to the amygdala, the primitive emotion driven center
24:49
of the brain light or flight right. The brain stops
24:51
caring about the trial that will happen in a year.
24:53
It only cares about immediate survival.
24:55
Speaker 2: Wow.
24:56
Speaker 1: The sole objective becomes how do I make the aggressive
24:59
man yelling at me oup right now so I can
25:01
go to sleep.
25:02
Speaker 2: And the ads to the detective provides is confess, just.
25:06
Speaker 1: Sign the paper. And we see the ultimate tragic result
25:10
of this. In the case of Wesley Myers from the documentary.
25:13
Speaker 2: Yes, a perfect example.
25:15
Speaker 1: He is fingered for a murder, brought in and subjected
25:18
to a marathon interrogation session powers and by the end
25:22
of it, his reality is so completely fractured, his cognitive
25:26
function so deeply impaired, that he doesn't just confess once. No,
25:31
he gives three entirely separate confessions, which is wild. He
25:35
writes one out by hand, he dictates one onto a
25:37
cassette tape, and he even repeats it on camera for
25:40
a news reporter.
25:41
Speaker 2: Now, to a jury, three separate confessions look like an ironclad,
25:45
undeniable mountain of evidence.
25:47
Speaker 1: They think, well, he said it three times, he must have.
25:49
Speaker 2: Done it right. But from a psychological perspective, it is
25:52
the signature of a broken mind. Yeah, it is a
25:56
man whose internal narrative has been completely overwritten by the
25:59
authority figures in the room. The system didn't discover the truth,
26:03
it manufactured a reality.
26:05
Speaker 1: And this terrifying malleability of the human mind isn't just
26:08
limited to the sterile confines of the police station.
26:11
Speaker 2: No, it can spread.
26:12
Speaker 1: It can infect an entire community, which brings us to
26:17
the two thousand and three HBO documentary Capturing the Freedman's
26:21
a classic. If the Confession tape shows how pressure can
26:24
break an individual, Freedman shows how it can obliterate an
26:27
entire family and rewrite history.
26:29
Speaker 2: This film is a masterpiece of documentary journalism because it
26:33
deals with the absolute messiness of memory, plasticity and mass hysteria.
26:38
Speaker 1: The premise is deeply unsettling. It's the nineteen eighties, a
26:42
middle class Long Island family. The Freedman's completely implodes when
26:46
the father, Arnold and the teenage son Jesse are accused
26:50
of running a massive child abuse ring out of the
26:52
computer classes they taught in their basement. Yes, what makes
26:55
this film so unprecedented is the access The director, Andrew Jerrick,
26:59
didn't do interview people. Decades later, he got hold of
27:02
the Friedman's own home video camera tapes.
27:05
Speaker 2: It is the ultimate intrusion into the private sphere.
27:08
Speaker 1: It feels illegal to watch.
27:09
Speaker 2: Sometimes you are watching the family literally tear itself apart
27:12
from the inside in real time.
27:15
Speaker 1: You see the father and sons screaming at each other
27:18
while awaiting trial. You see the police raid footage. You
27:22
are a fly on the wall during deeply intimate, agonizing
27:26
family therapy sessions.
27:27
Speaker 2: But the core tension of the film. The debate that
27:30
still rages today is about the nature of Jesse Friedman's
27:34
confession and the testimonies of the child victims.
27:37
Speaker 1: Because the investigation occurred during the height of the nineteen
27:40
eighties Satanic Panic, Yes, a period characterized by widespread, unfounded
27:45
fears of organized cult abuse.
27:47
Speaker 2: The whole country was on edge.
27:49
Speaker 1: And the police and the therapists involved used highly aggressive
27:53
leading interviewing techniques on the children in the community.
27:56
Speaker 2: This is where it gets into dangerous procedural territory.
27:59
Speaker 1: They were asked asking these kids questions like did you
28:01
see the clown masks? Did he take you into the
28:03
secret room?
28:04
Speaker 2: Befeeding them the narrative right.
28:06
Speaker 1: And if the kids said no, they would say, well,
28:08
your friend Jimmy said you were there. Are you calling
28:10
Jimmy a liar?
28:12
Speaker 2: If we connake this to the cognitive science of memory,
28:15
we know that human memory is not a video recording
28:18
that you simply play back.
28:19
Speaker 1: It's not a hard drive.
28:20
Speaker 2: No memories reconstructive. Every time you recall an event, your
28:26
brain pulls the disparate pieces of data together and rebuilds
28:30
the memory. Okay, in children who are highly susceptible to
28:33
suggestion from authority figures. Repeatedly asking leading questions can literally
28:38
physically alter the synaptic connections in their brains.
28:42
Speaker 1: They actually start to believe it.
28:43
Speaker 2: They begin to genuinely remember things that never happened. The
28:49
memory is contaminated.
28:50
Speaker 1: So you have a community whipped into a total panic.
28:53
You have children with contaminated memories providing wild accusations. And
28:56
you have Jesse Friedman, a teenager facing the terrifying prospect
29:00
of multiple life sentences if he goes to trial.
29:03
Speaker 2: The pressure is unimaginable, so.
29:04
Speaker 1: He takes a plea deal. He confesses to horrific crimes
29:07
to avoid a longer sentence.
29:09
Speaker 2: What's fascinating here is how the documentary forces the audience
29:12
to live in the ambiguity.
29:13
Speaker 1: Yeah, you never really know for sure.
29:15
Speaker 2: Right with the VLAO kidnapping, we eventually get the objective truth.
29:19
Matthew Muller did it right. With the Freedman's the procedural
29:23
waters were muddied so thoroughly by bad interviewing techniques and
29:27
public hysteria that the absolute objective truth might be permanently lost.
29:33
Speaker 1: It's gone forever.
29:34
Speaker 2: The procedure itself destroyed the evidence, which in this case
29:37
was the pristine memories of the witnesses.
29:39
Speaker 1: Okay, so human memory is fragile and confessions can be
29:43
completely fabricated under pressure, clearly, But what happens when the
29:48
one thing we are told to trust without question the
29:51
physical evidence, the DNA, the science from our very first segment.
29:56
What happens when that is called into question?
29:59
Speaker 2: Oh that's a whole level, right.
30:01
Speaker 1: What happens when the physical bedrock of the justice system
30:03
is suspected of being compromised?
30:06
Speaker 2: Then you are looking at an entirely different tier of
30:08
systemic failure. You are no longer just questioning the competence
30:11
or the cognitive biases of the investigators.
30:14
Speaker 1: You're questioning everything.
30:15
Speaker 2: You are putting the integrity of the entire institution on trial.
30:18
You were looking at the terrifying prospect of systemic corruption.
30:22
Speaker 1: And there is no better or more explosive example of
30:26
this than the cultural phenomenon that was Making a Murderer.
30:30
Speaker 2: That show changed everything.
30:31
Speaker 1: When this hit Netflix in twenty fifteen, it completely hijacked
30:35
the global conversation. Everyone was talking about it.
30:38
Speaker 2: Everyone.
30:39
Speaker 1: The premise is so wild that if it were fiction,
30:41
you'd say it was unrealistic. We follow the story of
30:44
Stephen Avery, a man from Manitouac County, Wisconsin, who was
30:49
wrongfully convicted of a brutal assault and spent eighteen years
30:53
in maximum security prison.
30:54
Speaker 2: Eighteen years stolen due.
30:56
Speaker 1: To faulty eyewitness testimony and deeply flawed initial police work.
31:00
Speaker 2: But he is eventually exonerated by the advent of advanced
31:03
DNA testing.
31:04
Speaker 1: Right the objective science finally corrected the human error of
31:07
the past.
31:08
Speaker 2: Science saves the day.
31:09
Speaker 1: Exactly he is released. He is a high profile exonery.
31:13
He becomes the face of wrongful conviction legislation in the state,
31:16
a local hero almost and he files a massive, multi
31:20
million dollar civil rights lawsuit against the very county and
31:23
the specific law enforcement officials who put him away.
31:26
Speaker 2: The county is facing financial ruin.
31:28
Speaker 1: And public humiliation. And then, right in the middle of
31:32
these depositions, Stephen Avery is arrested again. It's unbelievable, this
31:37
time as the prime suspect in the horrific murder of
31:40
a young photographer named Teresa Halbeck.
31:43
Speaker 2: Statistically speaking, the probability of an innocent man serving nearly
31:46
two decades in prison being exonerated and then immediately committing
31:51
a complex, gruesome murder in the exact same small town
31:55
jurisdiction he is currently suing for millions of dollars.
31:58
Speaker 1: It's like lightning striking twice in the exact same spot.
32:01
Speaker 2: It is vanishingly small. It defies statistical logic.
32:04
Speaker 1: Which instantly injects the series with its core explosive tension.
32:09
The documentary poses a terrifying hypothesis. What if the police,
32:13
facing professional and financial ruin from Avery's lawsuit use their
32:17
unfettered access to the crime scene to plant the physical evidence.
32:21
Speaker 2: The series meticulously dissects the epistemology of evidence.
32:24
Speaker 1: Epistemology, how do we.
32:26
Speaker 2: Know what we know? We see a key belonging to
32:28
the victim found in Avery's bedroom. A bloody fingerprint is
32:32
usually the end of an argument. Blood matching Avery's DNA
32:35
is found inside the victim's car. A bullet with the
32:37
victim of DNA is found in Avery's garage. On paper,
32:41
it is a forensic slam dunk, But.
32:43
Speaker 1: The documentary forces you to look at the chain of custody.
32:47
It is like peeling back the wallpaper and finding black
32:50
mold in the foundation of the house.
32:52
Speaker 2: You have to look at the source.
32:53
Speaker 1: You start asking the uncomfortable questions who found that key?
32:58
Speaker 2: And the answer is troubling.
32:59
Speaker 1: It was found by the exact officers from Manatawac County
33:03
who were being deposed in Avery's lawsuit, Officers who were
33:06
explicitly supposed to be recused from the search due to
33:09
their massive conflict of interest. They shouldn't have even been
33:12
in the room, and they found it out in the open,
33:14
in a small bedroom that had already been searched thoroughly
33:18
by other officers six separate times.
33:21
Speaker 2: It raises massive red flags.
33:23
Speaker 1: And the blood in the car. The documentary reveals that
33:26
an old vial of Avery's blood drawn during his previous
33:30
wrongical conviction was sitting in an unsecured county evidence locker, and.
33:35
Speaker 2: The evidence seal in the box had been broken just
33:37
sitting there. It introduces the concept of EDTA.
33:40
Speaker 1: Right, the chemical preservative, exactly a.
33:43
Speaker 2: Chemical preservative used in blood viles. If EDTA was found
33:47
in the blood in the car, it would prove the
33:49
blood was planted from the vial, not blood naturally from
33:53
Avery's finger.
33:54
Speaker 1: It would prove the framing and.
33:55
Speaker 2: The scientific debate over the reliability of the FBI's rapid
33:59
EDTA test becomes a central battleground of the show.
34:02
Speaker 1: It is incredibly dense procedural warfare, and on top of that,
34:08
you have the interrogation of Avery's learning disabled teenage nephew,
34:12
Brendan Dassy.
34:13
Speaker 2: This is where it connects back to our previous discussion.
34:15
Speaker 1: We are back in the interrogation room and we watch
34:17
investigators use the exact read technique tactics we discussed.
34:21
Speaker 2: Earlier, minimization, feeding facts, making false promises, all of it.
34:25
Speaker 1: On a highly suggestible kid without a lawyer or a
34:27
parent present, until he confesses to being a co conspirator.
34:31
Speaker 2: What's fascinating here is that making a murderer introduces the
34:35
psychology of institutional self preservation. It is not necessarily that
34:39
every officer involved was a cartoon villain turling their mustache
34:44
deciding to frame a man.
34:45
Speaker 1: It's more subtle than that.
34:46
Speaker 2: It is about how a system, when threatened with destruction,
34:50
can engage in a collective, motivated cognitive closure.
34:54
Speaker 1: They needed to solve it fast, They.
34:56
Speaker 2: Needed a suspect. Avery was the most convenient target, and
35:00
the procedural safeguards the chain of custody, the recusal of
35:03
conflicted officers were completely ignored to achieve that goal.
35:07
Speaker 1: Whether you walk away from that documentary believing Stephen Avery
35:11
is completely innocent, or whether you think he is guilty
35:14
but the police planted evidence to make sure it's stuck,
35:17
and that debate is still viciously fought today.
35:20
Speaker 2: Oh.
35:20
Speaker 1: Absolutely, the documentary succeeded in something massive. It taught millions
35:24
of people that evidence doesn't magically appear in a courtroom.
35:27
Speaker 2: No, it is collected, stored, and transported by highly fallible humans.
35:32
Speaker 1: It put the investigative procedure itself on trial, forcing the
35:35
public to demand transparency in the most basic mechanical functions
35:38
of law enforcement.
35:39
Speaker 2: Exactly.
35:40
Speaker 1: Okay, So we've looked at what happens when the police
35:42
battle their own biases, and we've looked at what happens
35:44
when a department is accused of systemic corruption. Ye, but
35:48
I want to pivot to something completely different. What happens
35:52
when the investigators are earnest, the science is ready, but
35:55
the crime itself is so extraordinarily bizarre, so completely unhind reality,
36:01
that standard police procedure is just fundamentally unequipped to handle it.
36:05
Speaker 2: Standard operating procedure or SOP is designed to manage.
36:09
Speaker 1: The mundane, the everyday stuff.
36:10
Speaker 2: Right. It is built for domestic disputes, bar fights, and
36:14
robberies motivated by simple greed. Sop relies on the assumption
36:18
that the criminal is operating under some form of rational logic,
36:22
even if it is a twisted logic.
36:24
Speaker 1: But the two thousand and three Pennsylvania bank heist documented
36:28
in the Netflix series Evil Genius contains absolutely zero.
36:31
Speaker 2: Rational logic, none whatsoever.
36:33
Speaker 1: It is pure chaotic spectacle, and the details are so
36:37
macob it's hard to even process them as reality.
36:39
Speaker 2: It remains one of the most complex and bizarre investigations
36:42
in the history of the FBI.
36:43
Speaker 1: Here's the inciting incident. A middle aged pizza delivery man
36:47
named Brian Wells walks into a P and C bank
36:50
in Eerie Pennsylvania, Okay. He is carrying a walking cane
36:53
that has been hallowed out and custom machined into a
36:56
fully functional shotgun a cane gun a cane gun, and
37:00
locked around his neck literally fitted like a bulky metal collar.
37:06
Is a live, highly sophisticated explosive device.
37:09
Speaker 2: A collar bomb. It is a thread vector that sounds
37:12
like it belongs in a dystopian science fiction narrative not
37:16
a sleepy rust belt city.
37:17
Speaker 1: Right, Wells hands the teller a bizarrely detailed, multi page
37:22
handwritten note demanding two hundred and fifty thousand.
37:25
Speaker 2: Dollars, which is an oddly specific amount.
37:28
Speaker 1: He gets a fraction of that, walks out of the bank,
37:30
gets in his car, but is almost immediately pulled over
37:33
and surrounded by Pennsylvania State Police in a nearby parking lot.
37:37
Speaker 2: And the raw body cam and local news footage of
37:40
this standoff is some of the most agonizing chilling tape
37:43
you'll ever.
37:44
Speaker 1: Watch, because you are watching the tragic limitations of procedural
37:48
protocol in real time. Exactly Wells is sitting cross leg
37:51
on the pavement. He is handcuffed. He is not acting
37:54
like a bank robber. He is terrified.
37:56
Speaker 2: He's pleading.
37:57
Speaker 1: He is desperately pleading with the officers, telling them that
37:59
he has a hot that a group of people strap
38:01
this bomb to his neck and forced him to do
38:03
the robbery.
38:04
Speaker 2: And he's begging them for help.
38:05
Speaker 1: He is begging them to call the bomb squad and
38:09
unlock the caller because it is on a timer.
38:11
Speaker 2: And the police officers, following their exact training for an
38:15
armed suspect with a potential explosive device have retreated behind
38:19
their cruisers. Right, they have their weapons drawn, but they
38:22
are keeping a massive distance and just standing there because
38:25
the procedure dictates containment. You isolate the threat and you
38:29
wait for the specialized explosive Ordnance DISCOSAL units to arrive
38:33
from a larger.
38:33
Speaker 1: City because they aren't equipped for it.
38:35
Speaker 2: Right. It is the correct protocol to protect the lives
38:38
of the officers and the public, But the procedure is
38:41
too slow for the reality of the device. The clock
38:44
is ticking, The protocol demands waiting, The bomb's timer demands
38:48
immediate action. It is a fatal mismatch, and.
38:51
Speaker 1: The tragedy unfolds on live television.
38:53
Speaker 2: It does.
38:54
Speaker 1: The bomb begins to beep rapidly, and it detonates before
38:57
the bomb squad can even get close. Brian Walls is
39:00
killed instantly, right there in the parking lot.
39:02
Speaker 2: And in the immediate aftermath, law enforcement is paralyzed by
39:06
the sheer novelty of the crime.
39:08
Speaker 1: They didn't know what to do.
39:09
Speaker 2: How do you categorize this? Is it a bank robbery?
39:12
Is it a hostage situation? Is it an act of
39:14
domestic terrorism? Is Brian Wells a victim or is he
39:19
a co conspirator who was betrayed by his accomplices.
39:22
Speaker 1: And the investigation that follows, as shown in the documentary,
39:24
is this incredibly deep dive into trying to map the unmappable.
39:28
Speaker 2: It's pure chaos.
39:29
Speaker 1: The FBI takes over and they deploy their massive procedural machinery.
39:34
We were talking wiretaps, sweeping search warrants, and intense interrogations.
39:39
But the clues they are finding make no sense.
39:41
Speaker 2: Because the constiracy was orchestrated by a cluster of profoundly
39:45
chaotic minds.
39:46
Speaker 1: You have this cast of local misfits. The central figure
39:49
is a woman named Marjorie dial Armstrong, who is described
39:52
as a bipolar genius with a history of dead romantic partners. Yes,
39:55
you have a man named Bill Rothstain, a brilliant but
39:58
eccentric quarterer. You have a victed child molester his bizarre group,
40:02
and the physical evidence they leave behind is like a
40:04
Macabs scavenger hunt. Literally, the note Brian Weld had gave
40:09
him a set of complex timed tasks he had to
40:12
complete around the city to find keys to unlock the bomb.
40:15
Speaker 2: The perpetrators design what they genuinely believed was the perfect crime.
40:19
Speaker 1: In their own twisted way.
40:21
Speaker 2: They thought they could create a kinetic, constantly moving puzzle
40:25
that would distract the police long enough for them to
40:27
secure the money.
40:29
Speaker 1: Like a movie plot.
40:30
Speaker 2: But because the plot relied on so many moving parts,
40:33
and because it was designed by individuals with severe untreated
40:37
mental illnesses, the execution was catastrophically flawed.
40:41
Speaker 1: And the police keep finding the most absurd evidence. They
40:44
find complex hand drawn bomb schematics that looked like they
40:47
were drawn by a mad scientist. They deal with jailhouse
40:51
informants telling wild stories. Oh and right in the middle
40:55
of the investigation, Bill Rothstein casually calls the police to
40:59
report that they're there is a completely unrelated frozen corpse
41:03
stored in a chest freezer in his garage.
41:05
Speaker 2: Which turns out to be Marjory deal Armstrong's dead boyfriend.
41:08
Speaker 1: It is just layer upon layer of American scale insanity.
41:12
Speaker 2: But this raises an important point about the resilience of
41:15
the investigative framework house. When faced with an irrational adversary,
41:19
the police cannot afford to become irrational themselves. The documentary
41:24
shows that the spectacle of the collar bomb distracted the public,
41:28
but the slow, methodical, relentless grinding of the FBI's procedure
41:33
eventually cut through the noise.
41:36
Speaker 1: So what does this all mean in the end? How
41:38
do you solve a crime this crazy.
41:40
Speaker 2: By breaking it down into his smallest, most boring components.
41:44
Speaker 1: That tiny details.
41:45
Speaker 2: They traced the specific type of metal used in the collar.
41:49
They followed the origin of the kitchen timer used in
41:51
the detonator. Oh wow, They mapped the phone calls between
41:54
Marjorie and Bill. They didn't solve it with a flash
41:58
of insight. They solved it through a trish.
42:00
Speaker 1: They just wore them down.
42:01
Speaker 2: They untangled the chaotic web until the conspirators inevitably turned
42:05
on each other and confessed. It is a testament to
42:08
the fact that while procedure might be too slow to
42:10
stop a bomb from detonating, its methodical memory is long
42:14
enough to eventually catch the people who built it.
42:16
Speaker 1: Which brings us to our final segment. We are shifting
42:18
gears completely. We are moving away from these loud public spectacles,
42:23
away from the complex conspiracies and the massive systemic failures.
42:28
Speaker 2: Going small.
42:29
Speaker 1: We are stripping it all back. We are returning to
42:32
the quiet, chilling, intimacy of.
42:34
Speaker 2: The custody suite, the interrogation room.
42:36
Speaker 1: But this time we aren't looking at false confessions. We
42:38
are looking at what happens when the microphones capture the pure,
42:43
unfiltered sound of absolute guilt.
42:45
Speaker 2: This is where the procedure stops being a puzzle to
42:48
be solved and becomes a mirror reflecting the absolute darkest,
42:53
most terrifying aspects of human psychology.
42:56
Speaker 1: Our sources point us to a highly anticipated twenty twenty
42:59
five relief. Fred and Rose West a British horror story. Yes,
43:03
for anyone in the UK, the names Fred and Rose
43:05
West are synonymous with ultimate evil. We are talking about
43:08
the infamous Gloucester House of Horrors on Cromwell Street.
43:11
Speaker 2: It's infamous.
43:12
Speaker 1: Over the course of decades, the seemingly ordinary married couple
43:15
tortured and murdered at least twelve women and girls, and
43:18
the victims included their own daughters.
43:21
Speaker 2: The juxtaposition is what makes this case so deeply ingrained
43:25
in the public nightmare. It is the collision of domestic banality,
43:29
a normal looking house on a normal looking street with
43:32
unspeakable sadistic depravity happening in the cellar and under the patio.
43:37
Speaker 1: And what makes this new docuseries essential viewing is its
43:41
reliance on newly discovered raw police audio.
43:45
Speaker 2: Recordings, the tapes.
43:47
Speaker 1: We are back in the interview room, but this is
43:50
the inverse of the coerced confessions we talked about earlier.
43:53
Speaker 2: Pletely different dynamic.
43:55
Speaker 1: On these tapes. You hear Fred West casually, almost cheerfully,
43:59
discussing the horrific abuse and murder of these young women.
44:02
Speaker 2: It's chilling.
44:03
Speaker 1: He talks about it like he is describing a plumbing
44:05
project he did over the weekend, and right next door,
44:07
in a separate room, you have Rose West delivering these
44:10
stone cold, flat, emotionless denials.
44:14
Speaker 2: If we connect this to the psychology of the investigators,
44:17
the challenge here is entirely different. How So, the detectors
44:20
are not trying to break down a suspect's reality, They
44:23
are trying to maintain their own. They are sitting across
44:25
a table from individuals who are completely pathologically devoid of
44:29
normal human empathy. The primary objective of the detective is
44:34
to maintain procedural composure, to ensure every legal right is respected,
44:39
while absorbing the details of pure depravity.
44:41
Speaker 1: The series is described as a custodied documentary on steroids
44:46
because it is not just the interviews. It shows the
44:48
incredible physical and emotional grit of the procedure, the legwork.
44:53
We see, the house to house inquiries, and most profoundly,
44:56
we see the forensic archaeology teams.
44:59
Speaker 2: Which is an incredible specialized feel.
45:01
Speaker 1: Explain that of it.
45:01
Speaker 2: Forensic archaeology applies the meticulous, slow techniques of historical excavation
45:06
to a modern.
45:07
Speaker 1: Crime scene, right because they aren't just taking a back
45:10
ho to.
45:10
Speaker 2: The garden, No, not at all. They have to methodically
45:13
dig up an ordinary family patio, layer by layer, inch
45:16
by inch, cataloging the stratification of the soil.
45:19
Speaker 1: It's agonizingly slow.
45:20
Speaker 2: They have to distinguish between animal bones Victorian trash buried
45:24
decades ago, and the tiny bone fragments of a murdered child, and.
45:29
Speaker 1: Every single fragment has to be mapped in three dimensions, photographed,
45:33
and securely bagged to maintain that sacred chain of custody
45:36
we discussed earlier.
45:37
Speaker 2: Exactly it is grueling, painstaking work that takes weeks, completely
45:41
exposed to the elements and the scrutiny of.
45:43
Speaker 1: The press and the emotional toll on the officers is staggering.
45:47
Speaker 2: I can't even imagine.
45:48
Speaker 1: Imagine the compartmentalization required. You are the detective who has
45:53
to sit in that claustrophobic room, listen to Fred West
45:57
amiably described dismembering a girl, and then you have to
46:00
walk outside, grab a coffee, and watch a team in
46:03
white suits dig up a femur from the flower bed.
46:05
Speaker 2: It highlights a truth that is often overlooked. The machinery
46:09
of policing is ultimately fueled by human endurance. Yeah, the
46:13
officers who worked the West case had to compartmentalize immense
46:16
secondary trauma to ensure the procedure was executed.
46:20
Speaker 1: Flawlessly, so it holds up in court.
46:22
Speaker 2: Right, so that when it finally went to court, there
46:24
would be absolutely no loopholes for the defense to exploit.
46:27
Speaker 1: And we see a different kind of unfiltered guilt born
46:30
from a completely different kind of psychology. In our final source,
46:34
The Jinx The Life and Deaths.
46:36
Speaker 2: Of Robert Durst, Oh Jings.
46:39
Speaker 1: This is the landmark twenty fifteen HBO series, along with
46:42
its twenty twenty four sequel. Robert Durst wasn't a working
46:45
class builder like Fred West. No, Durst was an eccentric
46:49
billionaire real estate heir from New York, and he spent
46:53
literally decades evading justice for the murder of his wife,
46:56
the murder of his best friend, and the murder and
46:59
dismemberment of a neighbor in Texas.
47:01
Speaker 2: Robert Jurres represents the ultimate stress tests of the justice
47:04
system against the insulating power of extreme wealth and privilege.
47:08
Speaker 1: Money talks for.
47:09
Speaker 2: A very long time. His money allowed him to simply
47:12
outrun the procedure.
47:13
Speaker 1: He could hire the most expensive, aggressive defense attorneys in
47:16
the country. He could post massive bail amounts in cash
47:19
and simply disappear into the ether.
47:21
Speaker 2: He could afford to live off the grid or in
47:23
plain sight.
47:24
Speaker 1: But the documentary meticulously tracks the procedural web that slowly,
47:28
inevitably tightened around him.
47:30
Speaker 2: He catches up.
47:30
Speaker 1: The filmmakers use real police files, showing how cold case
47:34
detectives in New York started communicating with detectives in Los Angeles,
47:38
connecting disparate pieces of evidence across decades and thousands of miles.
47:42
Speaker 2: Connecting the dots.
47:43
Speaker 1: You hear, the wire taps, you see the discovery of
47:46
the bodies. But the most captivating part of the JINKX
47:49
is watching Durst's own interviews.
47:51
Speaker 2: He is mesmerizing in the worst way.
47:54
Speaker 1: He agrees to sit down with the filmmaker Andrew Jerocke,
47:57
and Durst is so bizarre, so incredibly arrogant. He twitches,
48:01
he blinks strangely, He gives these evasive, weirdly literal answers.
48:06
Speaker 2: Hubris is the unifying factor between these killers. Hubris, whether
48:10
it is the insulated domestic depravity of Fred and Rose West,
48:14
who honestly believed they could turn their own family home
48:16
into a mass grave without anyone noticing right, or the
48:19
wealth shielded arrogance of Robert Durst, who believed his bank
48:23
account literally placed him above the laws of physics and society.
48:26
Speaker 1: They both thought they were untouchable.
48:28
Speaker 2: They both possessed a pathological narcissism. They believed they were
48:32
inherently smarter than the system investigating.
48:34
Speaker 1: Them, and that exact Hubris leads to arguably the most
48:39
famous jaw dropping moment in true crime documentary.
48:42
Speaker 2: History, the bathroom scene.
48:44
Speaker 1: It is the climax of the jinx. After a particularly
48:48
tense interview where he is confronted with damning new handwriting evidence,
48:53
Durst asks to use the bathroom right, but He completely
48:57
forgets that he is still wearing a live hot microphone
49:00
attached to his.
49:01
Speaker 2: Lapel, a leakage of the subconscious mind.
49:03
Speaker 1: He goes into the bathroom. The camera's off, but the
49:05
audio is still recording, and you hear him whispering to
49:08
himself alone in the room. He says, there it is,
49:11
You're caught.
49:12
Speaker 2: It gives me chills.
49:13
Speaker 1: He rambles for a moment, and then he delivers the
49:15
final chilling lines, what the hell did I do? Kill them? All?
49:18
Speaker 2: Of course a hot mic confession. It is the ultimate
49:22
procedural triumph, delivered entirely by the suspect's own monumental.
49:26
Speaker 1: Ego he caught himself.
49:28
Speaker 2: It is a profound demonstration that while money, manipulation and
49:32
high priced lawyers can delay justice, sometimes for decades, the meticulous,
49:36
relentless grinding of procedure eventually wins. It never stops, the
49:41
constant questioning, the tracking of handwriting samples, and the simple
49:44
fundamental act of keeping the tape rolling. It eventually catches them.
49:48
Even the richest man in the world cannot outrun procedure.
49:51
Speaker 1: Forever, and the twenty twenty four sequel just reinforces this,
49:55
showing how new evidence and continued monitoring kept that custody
49:58
room tension alive, ensuring that the net stayed tightly closed
50:02
around him until the end of his life.
50:04
Speaker 2: A perfect conclusion.
50:06
Speaker 1: If you love the intimacy of the interview room, the
50:08
durst Hot mic is the absolute pinnacle. This is where
50:11
you hear the unfiltered voice of a notorious killer, finally
50:16
definitively trapped by his own words.
50:18
Speaker 2: It is the rare, satisfying moment when the muddy waters
50:21
of human deception finally run crystal clear.
50:24
Speaker 1: Okay, let's pull all of this together. We have gone
50:26
on an incredible, deeply unsettling journey through these sources.
50:30
Speaker 2: Today we really have covered a lot of ground.
50:32
Speaker 1: We started by looking at the awe inspiring microscopic triumphs
50:35
of forensic science. We saw how a sixty second heist
50:39
in Birmingham was completely undone by the physics of light
50:43
bending through glass and the amplification of a single microscopic
50:47
skin cell on a discarded glove.
50:49
Speaker 2: That is the ideal procedure. That is a system working perfectly.
50:52
Speaker 1: But we then explored the vast dark expanse where that
50:55
procedure fails. We examined the infuriating pitfalls of cognitive tunnel
51:00
vision and confirmation bias in Valeo, California, where the neurological
51:04
instinct to rely on heuristics led detectives to torture an
51:08
innocent man and publicly shame of victim.
51:10
Speaker 3: And we dissected the read technique right looking at how
51:14
extreme physiological stress and psychological manipulation can completely override the
51:19
human instinct for self preservation, resulting in the tragedy of
51:22
false confessions.
51:23
Speaker 2: We watched the very epistemology of evidence be put on
51:26
trial in Wisconsin, exploring the terrifying possibility of institutional self
51:30
preservation and systemic corruption.
51:32
Speaker 1: We marveled at the unbelievable chaotic absurdity of a pizza
51:37
delivery man with a collar bomb in Pennsylvania and how
51:40
meticulous FBI procedures try to map the completely irrational minds
51:44
of a chaotic conspiracy.
51:46
Speaker 2: And finally, we returned to the darkest corners of the interview.
51:49
Speaker 1: Room, listening to the casual, remorseless confessions of serial killers
51:54
in Gloucester and the hubris fueled hot mic slip ups
51:57
of arrogant billionaires. It is is a comprehensive three hundred
52:02
and sixty degree look at the intersection of human frailty
52:05
and systemic process.
52:06
Speaker 2: And it leaves us with a critical final thought to
52:09
consider what's that? Because when you watch all these documentaries
52:12
back to back, a pattern emerges. These documentaries ultimately prove
52:16
something vital. The cameras mounted in the corners of the
52:19
custody suites, the microphones recording in the interrogation rooms, the
52:22
body cams strap to the chests of the responding officers.
52:25
They do not just exist to watch the suspect.
52:28
Speaker 1: They exist to watch the system itself exactly.
52:31
Speaker 2: And as forensic technology continues to advance at an exponential rate,
52:34
as three DCT scanning, digital fingerprint enhancement, and rapid DNA
52:39
sequencing become practically infallible, this raises a profound question for
52:44
the future of criminal justice.
52:46
Speaker 1: It really makes you wonder.
52:47
Speaker 2: If the physical science is perfect, will human error, cognitive bias,
52:51
and psychological manipulation become the only ways a case can
52:55
fall apart as the machines get sharper, does the ultimate
52:59
search for truth rely more on the microscopic data churning
53:02
in the lab or does it rely entirely on the
53:04
humanity The integrity and the exhaustion level of the detectives
53:08
sitting across the table.
53:10
Speaker 1: That's the real weak point, because if.
53:11
Speaker 2: The human element fails, if the detective decides you are
53:14
guilty before the lab report even prints out, the science
53:17
cannot save the case.
53:19
Speaker 1: That is the muddy water right there. The CT scanner
53:21
might be capable of mapping a perfect three D digital
53:24
image of the evidence, but the detective interpreting the narrative
53:27
is still just a flawed, sleek, deprived human being. It
53:30
is something to keep in the front of your mind
53:32
the next time you find yourself entirely captivated by one
53:35
of these investigations. I highly encourage you to seek out
53:39
these sources, dive into the raw footage yourself, and really
53:44
examine the incredible, terrifying machinery at work.
53:47
Speaker 2: It will change how you see everything.
53:48
Speaker 1: But a quick warning, binge responsibly, because once you start
53:52
peeling back the psychological layers of these procedures, your next
53:55
all nighter starts right now. Thank you so much for
53:57
joining us on this deep dive. Stay here, maurious, stay questioning,
54:01
and we will see you next time.